Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup

The Week That Was: 2013-10-05 (October 5, 2013) Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org) The Science and Environmental Policy Project

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Quote of the Week: The future is certain, only the past is unpredictable. Polish saying from Soviet times [H/t Tom Quirk]

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Number of the Week: 30

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NIPCC Co-Editors Fred Singer and Bob Carter will be making a presentation on Climate Change Reconsidered: Physical Science at 10 am on October 8 at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. On Oct 10 at 11 am, they will appear on the Roger Hedgecock show in San Diego. On Friday morning, Oct 11, they will be making a presentation at Chapman University. Details are not yet available. If you have an interest in attending any of these events, please contact Ken@SEPP.org and he will provide details as he receives them.

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THIS WEEK:

IPCC: The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of Working Group I (WGI), providing an assessment of the of the physical science: Final Draft Underlying Scientific-Technical Assessment. The report states that it has been accepted by WGI, but not approved in detail. The publically available report also carries the strange statement: “Confidential – This document is being made available in preparation of WGI-12 only and should not be cited, quoted, or distributed.” If the IPCC wishes it to be confidential, why does it place it on the web? The final, final report is expected out in January 2014. Given the history of the IPCC, we may see some major changes.

Also, the final version of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM) is not yet available, making a focused comparison between the IPCC (SPM) and the Summary for Policymakers by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) somewhat premature.

The IPCC reports have been intensely analyzed by a number of IPCC followers, with comments posted on various blogs as well as in the traditional press. These comments will provide the bulk of this issue of TWTW.

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Extreme Weather Events: First, the good news, at least for now. Roger Pielke Jr. reports that the critical chapter in AR5 does not support claims of more extreme weather events. He presents a list of statements he compiled from the key Chapter 2 of AR5. Pielke concludes: “Of course, I have no doubts that claims will still be made associating floods, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes with human-caused climate change — Zombie science — but I am declaring victory in this debate.”

The term Zombie Science may be less than complementary, but is appropriate for those who continue to reiterate future disasters from global warming without providing physical evidence of human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing dangerous global warming or that global warming will increase the intensity of extreme weather events. Since some politicians and governments have invested so heavily on proclaiming humans are causing extreme weather events, it will be interesting if this section survives the final revision. The SPM indicates that it may not.

No doubt, the EPA will use the statement that AR5 should not be cited, quoted, or distributed as grounds for rejecting its use in the upcoming public hearings on its new rules for power plants which embody a huge, questionable danger from human caused global warming. Please see links under IPCC report.

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IPCC Games: Almost immediately after the public distribution of AR5 by the IPCC, Steve McIntyre posted a clear example of why the IPCC cannot be trusted to maintain consistency from one draft to another draft, or explain why changes were made. The Second Order Draft, which went expert reviewers, contained a graph that clearly showed the discrepancies between projections of temperatures in prior IPCC assessment reports and observed temperatures. The observed surface temperatures were, correctly, below the projected envelope of temperatures from earlier reports. In the current AR5, the observed temperatures are within the projected envelope by the models.

Going through the messy new graph, McIntyre shows how, after expert review, the IPCC reconstructed the earlier projections to shift the envelope downward relative to the observations, thus incorporating the observations within the re-interpreted projections. McIntyre compares this to the classic shell game of picking under which shell the pea is hiding. It is a further example of the IPCC’s continued abuse of the peer review system and how the IPCC changes the past. Please see link under Climategate Continued.

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IPCC Version of Climate History: Writing in Watts Up With That?, geologist Don Easterbrook states: “When compared to the also recently published NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) 1000+-page volume of data on climate change with thousands of peer-reviewed references, the inescapable conclusion is that the IPCC report must be considered the grossest misrepresentation of data ever published.”

A key IPCC statement is that: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.” Easterbrook compares this statement with the temperature data for the 10 years, the last 500 years, the last 2000 years, the last 10,000 years, and the last 15,000 years. Easterbrook finds that more intense warming “has occurred many times in the past centuries and millennia.” Easterbrook goes on to expose other factually challenged statements in the AR5. Please see link under Climategate Continued.

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An Elephant in the Room: Writing in the Mail, UK, David Rose reports that, on September 27, he attended an IPCC press conference in Stockholm on the new SPM. He asked: “why the climate computer models failed to predict the continuing 17 year pause in global warming – and how much longer would this have to last before the IPCC thought the models might be wrong?”

Rose reports that Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, one of the two parent organizations of the IPCC replied: “Your question is what I would call ill posed from a scientific point of view. The models are proving more and more remarkable at predicting the long-term trend.”

According to Rose, Thomas Stocker, co-chair of WGI, added “if it lasted another 20 years, ‘that would not be expected’, and that climate trends should not be considered in periods of less than 30 years.” The leadership of the IPCC refuses to clutter their beautiful models and theory with messy data. See link under Questioning the Orthodoxy

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The Second Elephant in the Room: The IPCC ignores the second, larger elephant in the room. Over 33 years of satellite data that are compiled by two independent groups and separately supported by four sets of balloon data. These temperature data are comprehensive globally, except at the poles. They show a pronounced warming over the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere, little or no warming over the Tropics or the Southern Hemisphere and a cooling around Antarctica. The global warming models are inconsistent with these data. For some reason, one-third global warming does not sound compelling.

Instead of addressing these inconsistencies, the IPCC glosses over them. The SPM states: “It is virtually certain that globally the troposphere has warmed since the mid-20th century. More complete observations allow greater confidence in estimates of tropospheric temperature changes in the extratropical Northern Hemisphere than elsewhere. There is medium confidence in the rate of warming and its vertical structure in the Northern Hemisphere extra-tropical troposphere and low confidence elsewhere.”

In other words, the IPCC has great confidence in the part of the dataset that supports its theories and models, and no confidence in the part that does not. Such is the selective science of the IPCC.

By comparison, in its Summary for Policymakers, the NIPCC report specifically discusses the lack of a hot spot over the Tropics and the failure of the atmosphere above Antarctic to warm, as suggested by the models and greenhouse theory. Further, NIPCC suggests that the pronounced warming of the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere may be due to northerly transport of heat by the atmosphere and oceans and that this transport may be driven by changes in the Sun’s magnetic activity, which the IPCC report does not consider. The links can be found under NIPCC Report, IPCC Report, Questioning the Orthodoxy, and Models v. Observations.

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Other Posts: There are many excellent posts addressing the shortcomings of the IPCC SPM. Judith Curry has a large number that can be found under different headings, including the suggestion that the IPCC should be put down because it has become an obstacle in the development of climate science. Two very succinct posts are from physicists Nir Shaviv and Tom Quirk.

Presenting what he terms as the most boring graph he ever plotted, Nir Shaviv shows the changes in the projected likely range of climate sensitivity over time. That is our understanding of how sensitive temperatures are to a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2). There has been virtually no change in the scientific assessment of this critical calculation over three decades in spite of the expenditures of tens of billions of dollars. [Based on US government reports, SEPP calculates that since FY 1993, the US government spent over $150 Billion on climate change activities of which about $35 Billion is categorized as climate science.]

Shaviv dismisses the idea that failure to advance knowledge is due to general incompetence of the Climate Establishment. He states: “I think the real reason why there is no improvement in the understanding of climate sensitivity is the following. If you have a theory which is correct, then as progressively more data comes in, the agreement becomes better…However, if the basic premises of a theory are wrong, then there is no improved agreement as more data is collected. In fact, it is usually the opposite that takes place, the disagreement increases. In other words, the above behavior reflects the fact that the IPCC and alike are captives of a wrong conception.”

Tom Quirk goes directly to the IPCC’s reliance on computer models and the failure of these models to accurately project temperature trends for twenty years. Instead of directly addressing this failure, the IPCC uses ad hoc excuses why the models have failed. Quirk assess and rebuts some of these excuses. Quirk was the source of the Quote of the Week and uses a section from Gulliver’s Travels to describe the IPCC efforts. Links can be found under IPCC Report, Challenging the Orthodoxy, Questioning the Orthodoxy, and Seeking a Common Ground.

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Interacademy Council: For many, the big message of the IPCC SPM is that: “…the rise in global average temperatures over the past century is unequivocal, and it is ‘extremely likely’+ that more than half of the increase during the past 60 years stems from rising greenhouse-gas emissions.”

As discussed in September 21 TWTW, in reviewing the last IPCC report, The Interacademy Council specifically addressed the abuse in assigning quantitative probabilities (including confidence levels) by the IPCC. The Council stated that subjective probabilities should not be assigned to ill-defined outcomes, and quantitative probabilities (a likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence.

The IPCC presents no physical evidence substantiating it is “extremely likely” that more than half of the increase during the past 60 years stems from rising greenhouse-gas emissions or a rigorous method of calculating the 95 to 100% probability that the term extremely likely embodies. Clearly, the IPCC does not have a high regard for the Interacademy Council. The quote is from the Christian Science Monitor linked under Defending the Orthodoxy.

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Number of the Week: 30. According to reports, there are 30 nuclear power plants under construction in China. It would be very interesting to see a time frame from start to finish and the costs of completion for some of these plants as compared with similar plants under construction in developed countries, such as the US.

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ARTICLES:

For the numbered articles below please see this week’s TWTW at: http://www.sepp.org. The articles are at the end of the pdf.

The diagnosis of paradigm paralysis seems fatal in the case of the IPCC, given the widespread nature of the infection and intrinsic motivated reasoning. We need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible – not to protect the patient who seems to be thriving in its own little cocoon, but for the sake of the rest of us whom it is trying to infect with its disease. Fortunately much of the population seems to be immune, but some governments seem highly susceptible to the disease. However, the precautionary principle demands that we not take any risks here, and hence the IPCC should be put down.

Kill the IPCC: After decades and billions spent, the climate body still fails to prove humans behind warming

[SEPP Comment: Exposing the contradictions in the IPCC claim that the oceans are causing the failure of CO2 to warm the world. If the world is cooling or not warming, the cause is natural. If the world is warming, the cause is human. But the actual ocean heat content, assuming it is accurately measured, supports the skeptics.]

Although “both low and high temperatures were associated with increased mortality in the four subtropical Chinese cities,” according to Wu et al., they indicate that the “cold effect was more durable and pronounced than the hot effect.” And these observations clearly indicate that global warming leads to a net reduction in human mortality, which is just the opposite of what many climate alarmists and governmental agencies (like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United Nations IPCC) are promoting.

The pouring of first concrete today for another Russian-supplied reactor at the Tianwan site in China’s Jiangsu province brings the total number of power reactors currently under construction in the country to 30.

Anthony,
You asked for details about the Chinese program for nuclear power, including costs and construction times.
They are predominantly developing the AP1000 design. Here are some figures –
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“AP1000, CAP1000
The Westinghouse AP1000 is the main basis of China’s move to Generation III technology, and involves a major technology transfer agreement. It is a 1250 MWe gross reactor with two coolant loops. The first four AP1000 reactors are being built at Sanmen and Haiyang, for CNNC and China Power Investment Corp (CPI) respectively. Six more at three sites are firmly planned after them, at Sanmen, Haiyang and Lufeng (for CGN), and at least 30 more are proposed to follow. A State Council Research Office report in January 2011 emphasised that these should have priority over alternative designs such as CPR-1000, and this position strengthened following the Fukushima accident.
The reactors are built from modules fabricated adjacent to each site. The timeline is 50 months from first concrete to fuel loading, then six months to grid connection for the first four units, with this expected to reduce significantly for the following units. In October 2009, SNPTC and CNNC signed an agreement to co-develop and refine the AP1000 design, and this position strengthened following the Fukushima accident. (See also section below on Embarking upon Generation III plants).
CNEA estimated in May 2013 that the construction cost for two AP1000 units at Sanmen are CNY 40.1 billion ($6.54 billion), or 16,000 Yuan/kW installed ($2615/kW), instead of CNY 32.4 billion earlier estimated. This is about 20% higher than that of improved Generation II Chinese reactors, and 14% higher than latest estimate for CPR-1000, but likely to drop to about CNY 13,000/kW ($2120/kW) with series construction and localisation as envisaged. Grid purchase price is expected to exceed CNY 0.45/kWh at present costs, and drop to 0.42/kWh with reduced capital cost.
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Source (with much more relevant data) World Nuclear Association –http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/China–Nuclear-Power/#.UlJkfb64aUk
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Cheers Geoff.